About Me

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Something New

I didn’t have a post Tuesday because I spent the time on a little experiment: making my own video.

My computer came with Windows Movie Maker, so, after having my it for a few years, I decided to give it a try. While the subject is far from timely, I grabbed some shots from my 2009 vacation trip because I had many more to choose from.

Like most free software in general, and Microsoft software in particular, it leaves much to be desired. It’s quite cumbersome to use and has no way to do batch operations on photos or videos.

To get the zoom and fade effects, I had to right click twice on each photo, which was a time-consuming process but better than having to access the choices in the bar at the top.

Also, the blue-screen title cards were easy to do, but the titles on the photos were a bit complicated because they often got out of skew with their intended shot and I had to adjust them – many times.

The biggest problem came when I was nearly finished. I foolishly added a music clip that was about three minutes longer than my video. It appeared that I was able to shorten it to fit, but I eventually junked it,.

However, even after deleting it, the video time still registered as being three minutes longer. No matter what I tried, it wouldn’t get any shorter.

Instead, I had to start from square one, which didn’t make me very happy, but at least it took less time to do it the second time around.

Since videos must be uploaded to something like YouTube to be included in my blog, that was my next step. It produced a good news, bad news situation,

The good news was it was easy to do. The bad news was it took more than two hours to upload a video that is a little under four minutes long.

Anyway, after all that it came out OK, though it’s far from perfect. I think some of the photos flew past too quickly, despite my attempts to slow them down. I also wanted better transitions between the photos, but I couldn’t get that feature to work.

Will I do another video? The jury’s still out on that one. I know there’s better software out there, but I’m not going to put the money out to buy it. Writing and photos still will be the mainstays on this blog, but I might give it a try for a shorter video next time.

Thanks for reading Above Bellefonte and for letting me ramble on about this.